of spirit, art, science and other ideals. The question is not of a contradiction between idealists and materialists that has already been overcome, but of its higher unity...

Here Christianity attempts to object, assuring us that under the most varied conditions of production it preached its immutable truth. If it wishes in this way to prove the independence of spirit from matter, of philosophy from economics, then it completely forgets how often it changed its cloak...

[10-11] Of course, an individual person can rise above his class consciousness and do justice to the general interest. Sieyès and Mirabeau, although they belonged to the First Estate, nonetheless defended the interests of the Third Estate. But these exceptions only confirm the inductive rule that just as in natural science, so also in politics, the material is the prerequisite of the spiritual.

To take the Hegelian system as the point of departure for the materialist method might, of course, seem contradictory, because, as is known, "the Idea" occupies an even more prominent place in it than in any other speculative system. But the Hegelian Idea wants and must realize itself — it is, consequently, a disguised materialist. Conversely, reality appears there under the mask of the Idea or the logical concept...

The inductive method derives an ideal conclusion from a material fact. Its kinship with the socialist view, which makes the ideal representation dependent on physical need, political partisanship dependent on the material relations of production, is simply striking. This scientific path corresponds also to the needs of the masses, for whom the question is first and foremost one of material existence, whereas the ruling class insists on the deductive principle, on the unscientific prejudice that spiritual development, education and training must precede the material resolution of the social question.

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...half a century ago, as Feuerbach clearly and definitively proved, every religion is a substitute for human ignorance...

The aim and requirements of historical development consist in the striving to place all available material factors and forces at the service of human needs, to utilize nature, to create in the world a coherent system with the help of our spirit...

And that same natural instinct which created the world has also historically created its highest product — the Reason-endowed genus homo*. As has already been said, this development consists in making the diverse manifestations of nature and the world comprehensible to human Reason...

It is not the things which religion honors that are contemptible in themselves, but the religious manner of honoring them, which knows no bounds in its veneration...

The lower the stage of development of the idea of divinity, the more concrete it is, and the more contemporary the forms of religion, the more confused, the more distorted the religious ideas. The historical development of religion is characterized by its gradual decomposition...

For enlightened, progressive people, the blessed name of God is truly no more than the letter A, the beginning of the alphabet of their worldview. Once they have stepped over the beginning, the world moves evenly forward unimpeded and of itself. Everything in the world is natural, only the beginning of the world seems to these un-Christian Christians unnatural, or divine. Therefore they do not wish to renounce faith in the existence of God — a faith which, by the way, as has already been indicated above, has the good purpose of holding the "uneducated" in check...

The last and consequently the strongest support for unprejudiced minds in general — the undeniable purposiveness of nature, or of the world order. Who would deny the wonderful order of natural phenomena, their harmony, organization, or regularity? Not to mention the countless number of outdated individual examples, such as those...

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green, blue and variegated cuckoo eggs, always matching in color and size the eggs of those birds to which the cuckoo foists them upon, at every turn there is manifested a universal Reason, which governs all that lives and breathes, crawls and flies, be it matter, animal or human, as an expedient link in the whole...

There exists an ignorant manner, from which, however, it is so infinitely difficult to renounce — namely, to measure the external world by the standard of one's internal world. Because man pursues his aims with the help of will and consciousness, he supposes that behind universal purposiveness of nature there is hidden a being similar to himself with consciousness and will. Where freethought is developed to such a degree that one can no longer speak of an anthropomorphic deity, he still cannot renounce the philosophical mysticism which tells fairy tales about the will and representation of unconscious things, about the philosophy of the unconscious.

One cannot deny the fact that in dead matter there lives a life-giving drive to organize itself and that, consequently, the material world is not dead but alive. Of its will and purpose one can speak only relatively. However, this universal Reason manifests itself only dimly in the instinct of animals and receives pure, determinate expression only in the function of the human brain, in other words, in our consciousness. Just as one cannot call twilight, however much light there may be in it, clear daylight, so too non-human purposiveness, will, representation or Reason of nature deserve these names no more. If I permitted myself before, esteemed fellow citizens, to speak of this, it was only with the definite intention of ultimately discrediting this manner of expression. Without doubt, Reason is present in natural things. How else, without religious assistance, could a Reason-endowed human being come into being? Whoever recognizes Reason, that lever of every system and purposiveness, as a natural product, cannot but recognize the systematic purposiveness of nature. Yet notwithstanding, the spirit of man is the sole spirit. Neither the Reason in the movement of the stars, nor in the eggs of the cuckoo, nor the common sense in the construction of the bee's hive,
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[51-56] Scientific freedom, which subordinates all things and all qualities to human welfare, is thoroughly anti-religious freedom. Religious truth consists precisely in this: that it unnaturally elevates some natural, worldly quality to the heavens, tears it out of the living stream of life, and condemns it to stagnation in this religious swamp.

Thus, esteemed comrades, when I frequently call a simple truth "scientific," I thereby merely wish to say that scientific truth is also called worldly, or simple.

Clarity is necessary on this point because scientific priestcraft is seriously striving to aid religious priestcraft. We would very quickly dispose of the crudest superstition if hideous half-measures did not endeavor everywhere to fill the gaps of science. First and foremost, such a gap is unfamiliarity with epistemology, a lack of understanding of the human spirit. Just as the terrible phenomena of nature make a Laplander or an inhabitant of Tierra del Fuego superstitious, so the inner miracle of our thinking process twists a professor into the shape of superstition. The most enlightened freethinkers, who have already renounced religion and the name of Christian, still flounder in the swamp of religious ignorance so long as they do not clearly distinguish religious truth from simple truth, so long as the cognitive faculty—this organ of truth—remains a dark realm for them. After science had materialized everything heavenly, professors had nothing left but to elevate their profession—science—to the heavens. Academic science must, in their opinion, be of a different nature, of a different character than, for example, the science of a peasant, a dyer, a blacksmith. Scientific agriculture differs from ordinary peasant farming only in that its methods, its knowledge of the so-called laws of nature, are more extensive and complete...

We despise from the depths of our souls the bombastic phrase about "education and science," speeches about "ideal goods" from the lips of diploma-carrying lackeys, who today stupefy the people with labored idealism just as pagan priests once deceived them with the first secrets of nature they had discovered...

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Professors ensnared by religion transform the kingdom of God into the kingdom of scientific spirit. Just as God has his antipode—the devil—so the priestly professor has his—the materialist.

Materialist worldview is as old as religious disbelief. In our age, developing from the most primitive forms, they have gradually attained scientific clarity. But academic learning refuses to acknowledge this, because the democratic conclusions contained in materialism threaten its honored social position. Feuerbach says: "The characteristic peculiarity of the professor of philosophy is that he is not a philosopher, and conversely, the characteristic trait of the philosopher is that he is not a professor." Today we have gone even further. Not only philosophy, but science in general has outpaced its servants. Even where genuine materialist science has seized the professorial chair, there continues to cling to it—as an idealist remnant—unscientific religious nonsense, like a shell not yet shed from an already hatched chick...

Socialist need for just popular distribution of products demands democracy, demands political dominion of the people and tolerates no dominion of a clique that, with pretensions to Reason, appropriates the lion's share.

In order to set rational limits to this audacious greed, it is necessary to clearly understand the relationship between spirit and matter. Philosophy thus becomes a matter entirely close to the working class. However, esteemed comrades, I by no means wish to say by this that every worker must necessarily become a philosopher and study the relationship between idea and matter. Because we all eat bread, it is not required that we all know how to mill and bake. But just as the working class needs millers and bakers, it needs profound researchers who would track down the secret paths of the servants of Baal and expose their tricks. The enormous significance of mental labor is often still underestimated by workers of physical labor. A correct instinct tells them that the tone-setters—the paper-scrawlers of our bourgeois time—are their natural opponents. They see how the craft of fraud is covered with the legitimate sign of mental labor. Whence a very understandable...

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...with Russian nihilism, which has been quite rightly cast out by the doors of the International.

Man requires rational consistency in his head in order to be able to carry through rational consistency in his life. We, democrats and defenders of the Paris Commune, also have this need. Servile mediators and windbags might on this basis attribute religion to us. We decisively reject this word. Not because we do not recognize that there is something common or akin between religious and social-democratic wisdom, but because we wish to emphasize the difference, because we do not want to have anything in common with priestly affairs not only internally, but also externally, in our deeds and in our designation...

Primitive cannibalistic religion transformed itself into Christianized enlightened religion; philosophy developed culture and after many unstable, transitory systems finally achieved an immutable system of science, the system of democratic materialism...

We call ourselves materialists. Just as religion is the general name for diverse confessions, so materialism too is an elastic concept...

Philosophical materialists are characterized by the fact that they place the material world at the beginning, at the head, and regard idea or spirit as a consequence—whereas their opponents, in the manner of religion, derive things from the word ("and God said, and it became"), derive the material world from idea.

Serious scientific grounding had hitherto been lacking even for the materialists. Now we, social-democrats, call ourselves materialists—a name by which our opponents wished to debase us, knowing that this tainted name is again in honor. We could with just as much right call ourselves idealists, since our system is based on the general results of philosophy, on scientific investigation of idea, on precise knowledge of the nature of Reason. How little our opponents are capable of understanding us is evident from the contradictory names they give us. Sometimes we are crude materialists who strive only for material goods, sometimes, when it is a question of communist futurity, incorrigible idealists. In essence, we are both together. Sensuous, actual reality is our ideal. The ideal of social-democracy is material...

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Thus, we begin to reflect on something, but we never reflect on the beginning itself. We know once and for all that thinking must proceed from a given beginning, from an earthly phenomenon, and that consequently the question of the beginning of the beginning is a meaningless question, which contradicts the general law of thinking. Whoever speaks of the beginning of the world presupposes the beginning of the world in time. Here one can ask: but what was there before the beginning of the world? "There was nothing"—here are two words, one of which excludes the other...

All the metaphysics which Kant designates as the question of God, freedom, and immortality receives its final dismissal in our system through the cognition that Understanding and Reason are absolutely inductive capacities. This means that the world becomes perfectly comprehensible if we arrange and divide the studied things, in accordance with their common properties, into classes, species, concepts, genera. This is such a banal truth that it would not even be worth speaking of if faith in miracles, or superstition, did not still babble about deduction...

The luminaries of philosophy, one after another, have advanced the cause so far that we social-democrats, standing on their shoulders, understand perfectly clearly the mechanical nature of all cognition—religious, speculative, and mathematical. The notion that such a scientific result bears a partisan coloring, though it may seem contradictory, is nonetheless easily comprehensible, since social-democracy is the party that defends not narrow-partisan but general interests...

Philosophical mysticism is the undigested residue of religious faith. In order to put an end to both radically, it is necessary to convince oneself that facts do not rest on logical grounds, but rather the contrary—the ultimate ground of all logic is fact, deed, being.

I must apologize to the comrades for troubling them with such details; I know that only few would wish to delve into these detailed explanations, but a few—this is already sufficient. Just as it is unnecessary for everyone to calculate the motion of the planets, so it is necessary that some of us offer to the high representatives of official professorship that material over which they could break their heads...

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When the people gather and express their feelings and thoughts, — they are set upon by gendarmes.
Is this a system, logic, or consistency? Yes, after all it is! This is a system of baseness. Everything that they
[the ideologists of the "existing order." Ed.] do and say reduces to a logical idea: we are the cream
of society and wish to remain so eternally...

VI

[67-70] Time brought ever new phenomena, new experience, new things that were not foreseen. They did not correspond to the existing system, and therefore each time it was necessary to create a new one, until finally we, social-democrats, proved wise enough to possess a system sufficiently comprehensive for all present and future phenomena...

All science cannot be concentrated in a single person and still less in some individual concept. Yet I assert that we possess such a concentration. Does not the concept of matter contain all the materiality of the world?

Thus, every cognition has one common universal form, namely — the inductive method...

Induction is a familiar thing in natural science; but that it contains systematic world wisdom, called upon to banish all frivolousness — religious, philosophical, political — this is already an achievement of social-democracy.

Darwin teaches that man descended from animals. And he also distinguishes animal and
man, but only as two products of one and the same matter, two species of the same genus, two
results of one and the same system. Such systematic differentiation in consistent execution is as unfamiliar to our opponents as rational unity. How not to praise the old religious piety! There was at least a system. The earthly and the other world, masters and slaves, faith and knowledge — all were under the single governance of him who says: "I am the Lord thy God"...

The Devil then was merely an instrument, earthly existence — only a passing trial before eternal life. One was subordinated to the other, there was a center of gravity, there was a system. At least in comparison with present-day half-measures and freemasonry, there was throughout a certain wholeness...

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Reactionary malice has sniffed out the revolutionary consequences of the inductive system. Already
the teacher Hegel scattered ashes on the fire he himself had kindled...

According to the religious system the Lord God appears as the "first cause." Idealistic masons think to prove everything through Reason. Committed materialists seek in hidden atoms the causes of all that exists, whereas social-democrats prove everything inductively. We
proceed on principle inductively, that is, we know that deductively, from Reason, one cannot extract any cognition; only through Reason, from experience can knowledge be obtained...

[72-75] In place of religion social-democracy puts systematic world wisdom.
This wisdom finds its foundation, its "first cause" in factual circumstances.
The wisdom of other progressives acts precisely the same way in natural science, in family and business life it is equally rational. Only when it comes to matters of state does it strive to prove things, if not by the word of God, then at least by revelations of Reason...

The use of one and the same word lulls the Understanding, like "Our Father." Therefore, for variety's sake I wish to call our system the "system of empirical truth." The windbags of other parties still speak of divine, moral, logical and other truths. But we know neither divine nor human truth, we know one empirical truth. We can classify it with the help of special designations, but the common mark for all remains. Truths, whatever they may be called, are based on physical, real, material experience...

However different they may be, — great or small, weighty or weightless, spiritual or corporeal — all things of the world are alike in that they represent empirical objects of our cognitive faculty, empirical material of the intellect...

What then could prevent us from subsuming all things under the concept "empirical truth" or
"empirical phenomenon"? And then we can subdivide them into organic and inorganic, physical and moral, good and evil, etc., and so forth. Thanks to the common genus all contradictions are reconciled and united, everything lives under one roof. The difference lies only in form, and
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him with a scientific turn of mind tried to prove the opposite. He began with perishability, with doubt about sensuous truth, and through the bodily sensations of his own being proved the opposite. However, the scientific current could not yet manifest itself so consistently at that time. Only an impartial thinker, repeating Descartes' experiment, finds that if thoughts and doubts are stirring in one's head, then only bodily sensation convinces us of the existence of the thinking process. The philosopher distorted the fact; he wanted to prove the bodiless existence of abstract thought, he supposed that one could scientifically prove the supernatural truth of a religious and philosophical soul, when in reality he merely established the ordinary truth of bodily sensations...

Idealists, in the good sense of the word, are all honest people. And all the more so—social-democrats. Our goal is a great ideal. But idealists in the philosophical sense—are irresponsible. They assert that everything we see, hear, touch, etc., that the entire world of phenomena around us does not exist at all, that all this is merely fragments of thoughts. They assert that our intellect is the sole truth, that everything else is nothing but "representations," phantasmagorias, dim dreams, phenomena in the bad sense of the word. All that we perceive from the external world, in their opinion, are not objective truths, real things, but only the subjective play of our intellect. And when sound human Understanding nevertheless rebels against such assertions, they very convincingly prove to him that although he sees daily with his own eyes how the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, nevertheless science must instruct him sufficiently so that he learns to recognize this truth with the aid of his imperfect senses.

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Erscheinungen
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Sinne**

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* The remarks underlined with slanted lines were written by V. I. Lenin in the margin of the page. Therefore here and hereafter, if one cannot precisely determine to which passage Lenin's remark refers, the entire text of the given page is provided. Ed.

** - Phenomena in the bad sense. Ed.


And a blind hen, as the proverb says, now here, now there finds a grain. Such a blind hen is philosophical idealism. And it picked up a grain, namely the thought that what we see, hear, or touch in the world is not real objects or things. Natural-scientific physiology of the senses, in turn, with each day approaches more closely the fact that the variegated objects which our eye sees are only variegated visual sensations, that everything rough, fine, heavy that we feel is only sensuous sensations of heaviness, fineness, or roughness. Between our subjective sensations and objective objects there is no absolute boundary. The world is a world of our sensations...

Things in the world do not exist "in-themselves," but receive all their properties through mutual connection... Only in connection with a definite temperature is water liquid; in cold it becomes dense and solid; in heat it transforms into vapor; ordinarily it flows from top to bottom, but, encountering a lump of sugar in its path, it rises upward as well. It has in itself no properties, no existence, but receives them only in connection with other objects.

Everything is merely a property, or predicate, of nature; it surrounds us not in its supernatural objectivity or truth, but everywhere and in all places through its fleeting, diverse phenomena.

Questions about how the world would look without eyes, without the sun or without space, without temperature, intellect, or without sensations—these are absurd questions and only fools can reflect upon them. True, in life and in science we can distinguish, distinguish and classify to infinity, but in doing so we must not forget that everything constitutes a unified whole and everything is interconnected. The world is sensuous, and our senses, our intellect—are completely earthly.

This is not yet a "boundary" of man, but whoever wishes to step over it arrives at absurdity. If we prove that the immortal soul of a priest or the undoubted intellect of a philosopher are of the same, most ordinary nature as all other phenomena in the world, then thereby it will be proved—

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...it has been shown that "other" phenomena are just as true and incontrovertible as the indubitable Cartesian intellect. We not only believe, think, presume, or doubt that our sensations exist, but we truly and actually sense them. And conversely: all truth and reality rest solely on sensation, on bodily sensations. Soul and body, or subject and object, as is now often said, are of one and the same earthly, sensuous, empirical character.

"Life is a dream," said the ancients; now philosophers inform us of a novelty: "the world is our representation"...

To base truth not on the "word of God" and not on traditional "principles," but on the contrary, to build one's principles on bodily sensations—therein lies the essence of social-democratic philosophy...

V

[123-130] The Lord God created the human body from a lump of clay and breathed an immortal soul into it. From that very time there has existed dualism, or the theory of two worlds. One—the physical, material world—is trash; the other—the spiritual, or mental world of spirits—is the breath of the Lord. Philosophers have perpetuated this little fable, i.e., they have adapted it to the spirit of the age. Everything accessible to sight, hearing, and sensation—in a word, physical reality—is still considered filth; meanwhile, the thinking spirit is associated with the notion of some supernatural kingdom of truth, freedom, beauty. As in the Bible, so in philosophy the word "world" has a foul taste. Of all phenomena or objects of nature, philosophy deigns to pay attention to only one—spirit, that familiar breath of the Lord; and only for that reason that to its muddled mind it appears as something higher, supernatural, metaphysical...

A philosopher who soberly considers the human spirit alongside other objects as an aim of cognition ceases to be a philosopher, i.e., one of those who, studying the riddle of existence in general, withdraws into misty indefiniteness. He becomes a specialist, and "special science" concerning the theory of cognition becomes his specialty...

Behind the question of whether there dwells in our head some noble idealistic spirit or else an ordinary, precise human Understanding,

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there is concealed a practical question of whether power and right belong to the privileged nobility or to the common people...

Professors become leaders in the camp of evil. On the right flank commands Treitschke, in the center von Sybel, and on the left Jürgen Bona Meyer, doctor and professor of philosophy in Bonn...

In the previous article we have already spoken of the Cartesian trick, which professors of higher magic, or philosophy, perform almost daily before the public in order to thoroughly confuse it. The breath of the Lord is demonstrated as truth. True, this name enjoys a bad reputation: one cannot speak of an immortal soul before enlightened liberals. Therefore they pretend to be sober materialists, speak of consciousness, of the thinking or cognitive faculty...

We sense within us the physical existence of a thinking Reason, and in exactly the same way, with the same senses, we sense outside us lumps of clay, trees, bushes. And what we sense within us and what we sense outside us do not differ especially strongly from one another. Both belong to the category of sensuous phenomena, to empirical material, both are a matter of the senses. How, then, to distinguish subjective sensations from objective ones, the internal from the external, a hundred actual thalers from a hundred imagined ones—we shall speak of this in due course. Here one must understand that both the internal thought and the internal pain equally have their objective existence, and that, on the other hand, the external world is subjectively closely bound up with our organs...

Let us give the floor to Jürgen himself: "and the principally unbelieving person will again and again arrive at the philosophically proved truth that all our knowledge ultimately still rests upon some faith. Even the materialist accepts the very existence of the sensuous world on faith. He does not have immediate knowledge of the sensuous world; immediately he knows only the representation of it which exists in his imagination. He believes that this representation of his corresponds to something represented, that the represented world is precisely such as he represents it to himself; he believes, consequently, in the sensuous external world on the basis of the arguments of his spirit"...

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Vera Meyer is proven "philosophically," yet he knows only that he knows nothing, and that all is faith. He is modest in knowledge and science, but completely immodest in faith and religion. Faith and science are constantly confused with one another in his work—both, evidently, have no serious significance for him.

So it is "philosophically proven" that "our knowledge has come to an end." In order that the benevolent reader might understand this, we take the liberty of informing him that the guild of philosophers recently held a general assembly and solemnly resolved to withdraw the word "science" from circulation and replace it with "faith." All knowledge is now called faith. Knowledge no longer exists...

However, the gentleman professor corrects himself and speaks literally as follows: faith in the sensuous world is faith in one's own spirit. So then—everything, both spirit and nature, again rests on faith. He is wrong only in wishing to subject us materialists as well to the decision of his guild. For us, this decision has no binding force whatsoever. We remain with the old terminology, we retain knowledge for ourselves and leave faith to priests and doctors of philosophy.

Of course, "all our knowledge" rests on subjectivity. It is quite possible that this wall, against which we could smash our heads and which we therefore consider impenetrable, may be—I say this may be—freely overcome by gnomes, angels, devils, and other phantoms; perhaps this entire clay mass of the sensuous world does not even exist for them at all—but what is that to us? What do we care about a world that we do not feel, do not sense?

Perhaps that which people call fog and wind is in essence, purely objectively or "in itself," heavenly flutes and double basses. But precisely for that reason we have no concern whatsoever with such absurd objectivity. Social-Democratic materialists reason only about that which man perceives through experience. This includes his own spirit, his thinking faculty or power of imagination. What is accessible to experience we call truth, and only this is for us the object of science...

Ever since Kant made the critique of Reason his specialty, it has been established that our five senses alone are not sufficient for experience, that for this the participation of the intellect is also required...

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However, it proved beyond the power of the great philosopher to completely forget the fairy tale about clay, to fully liberate spirit from the oppression of spiritual fog, to separate science from religion.

The base view of matter, the "thing-in-itself" or supernatural truth, held all philosophers to a greater or lesser degree in the captivity of idealistic deception, which is exclusively maintained by faith in the metaphysical character of the human spirit.

This little weakness of our great critics is exploited by Prussian government philosophers in order to prepare a new religious reliquary, though admittedly an extremely pitiful one.

"Idealistic faith in God," says Yu. B. Meyer, "is of course not knowledge and will never become such; but it is no less clear that materialist disbelief in turn is not knowledge, but merely materialist faith, equally incapable of ever transforming itself into knowledge"...

VI

[130-136] Everyone in unison repeats the refrain: "back to Kant." In view of this, the question interesting us acquires significance that far exceeds the bounds of the petty personality of General Jürgen. It is not because they wish to return to Kant because this great thinker struck a powerful blow against the fairy tale of the immortal soul enclosed in filthy clay—he indeed did this; but because his system, on the other hand, left a gap through which a little metaphysics could again be smuggled in as contraband...

It is perfectly clear that all perverted wisdom rests on perverted use of our intellect. And no one has consciously and successfully striven to study the latter, to create a science of the theory of knowledge, as did the universally esteemed Immanuel Kant. But between him and his present hangers-on there exists an essential difference. In the great historical struggle he stood on the side of the right cause against evil; he used his genius for the revolutionary development of science, whereas our Prussian government philosophers put their "science" into the service of reactionary politics...

The maneuver by which Kant removed metaphysics from the temple while leaving a back door open for it is clearly marked by one phrase in his preface or introduction to the "Critique of Pure Reason." Since I do not have the text at hand at the moment, I cite

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in memory. This phrase reads: our cognition is limited to the phenomena of things. What they are in themselves, we cannot know...

One cannot deny: where there are phenomena, there is also something that appears. But what if this something itself is a phenomenon, if phenomena themselves appear? After all, there would be nothing illogical or irrational in it if everywhere in nature subjects and predicates were of one and the same kind. Why then must that which appears necessarily be of a completely different quality than the appearance itself? Why cannot things "for us" and things "in themselves," or appearance and truth, be made of one and the same empirical material, one and the same property?

Answer: because of the prejudice about a metaphysical world, because of faith in a finally exposed phantom and in an unnatural, outrageous truth that must necessarily be contained in it, these have also settled in the head of the great Kant.

The proposition: where there are phenomena which we can see, hear, touch, there must also be hidden something else, the so-called true or sublime, which cannot be seen, heard, or touched—this proposition is illogical, contrary to Kant...

The Understanding must operate only in conscious connection with materialist experience, and all appeals to hazy indeterminateness are unsuccessful and meaningless.

But, according to Heine, the professor from Königsberg had a servant, a simple man of the people named Lampe, for whom, it is claimed, castles in the air were a spiritual necessity. The philosopher took pity on him and reasoned as follows: since the world of experience is closely bound up with the Understanding, it gives only intellectual experiences, that is, phenomena or fragments of thoughts. Material things, known through experience, are not true truths, but merely phenomena in a bad sense of the word, phantoms or something of the sort. Actual things, things "in themselves," metaphysical truth, are not known through experience; in them one must believe, according to the well-known argu-

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* — Phenomena in a bad sense of the word. — Ed.


ment: where there is a phenomenon, there must be something (metaphysical) that appears.

Thus faith was saved, the supernatural was saved, and this came in very handy not only for the servant Lampe, but also for German professors in the "cultural struggle" for "national education" against the hated, radical atheist social-democrats. Here Immanuel Kant proved to be a useful man; he helped them find the desired, if not scientific, then very practical middle-ground point of view...

Social-democrats are firmly convinced that clerical Jesuits are far less harmful than "liberal" ones. Of all parties, the most vile is the party of the middle. It uses education and democracy as a fake label in order to foist its falsified wares on the people and to discredit genuine principles. True, these people justify themselves by saying that they act according to conscience and to the best of their Understanding; we readily believe that they know little, but these scoundrels do not want to know anything, do not want to learn anything...

Nearly a century has passed since Kant's time; during that time Hegel and Feuerbach lived, the unfortunate bourgeois economy triumphed, which plunders the people and throws them without work and wages onto the pavement when there is nothing more to extract from them...

Our pupils, contemporary wage workers, are sufficiently developed to finally understand social-democratic philosophy, which knows how to separate phenomena of nature as material of theoretical, or scientific, experimental, empirical, materialist, or, if you will, also subjective truth on the one hand, from pretentious or supernatural metaphysics on the other.

Just as in politics, in accordance with economic development directed at the displacement of middle classes and at the creation of property owners and the propertyless, parties group themselves more and more into only two camps: on one side employers, and on the other—wage earners, so

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2 schools
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[403

Page from I. Dietzgen's book "Small Philosophical Works"
with remarks by V. I. Lenin

Reduced in size


That which is called corporeal, physical, sensuous, material phenomenon is that general genus to which all Being belongs, whether ponderable or imponderable, body and spirit...
Although we do oppose the physical to the spiritual, nevertheless this distinction is only relative; it is merely two kinds of existence, not more and not less opposed to one another than dogs and cats, which, despite the enmity known to all, nevertheless belong to one and the same class or genus—to the genus of domestic animals.
Natural science in the narrow, generally accepted sense of the word, with whatever evidence it may have proven the origin of species and the development of the organic world from the inorganic, cannot give us a monistic worldview (the doctrine of the unity of nature: the unity of "spirit" and "matter," organic and inorganic, etc.), toward which our age strives so eagerly. The natural sciences arrive at all their discoveries only by means of intellect. The visible, ponderable and tangible part of this organ belongs, it is true, to the domain of natural science, but its function, thinking, already constitutes the subject of a separate science, which may be called logic, theory of knowledge, or dialectic. This final sphere of science—the understanding or misunderstanding of the functions of spirit—is thus the common homeland of religion, metaphysics, and antimetaphysical clarity. Here lies the bridge which leads from degrading superstitious slavery to humble freedom; and in the domain of freedom proud of its knowledge, humility reigns—that is, submission to material, physical necessity.

Monistic
Worldview*
NB NB
NB
* - monistic worldview. Ed.

The inevitable religion, which transforms itself for "philosophers" into inevitable metaphysics, transforms itself for sound scientific human Understanding into an irresistible theoretical necessity of a monistic worldview. The present force-matter, also called the world or being, is mystified by theologians and philosophers, because they do not understand that matter and intellect belong to one and the same kind, because they falsely represent to themselves the relation of both. Just as our understanding of political economy, so too our materialism is a scientific, historical conquest. We distinguish ourselves quite definitely both from the socialists of the past and from the earlier materialists. We have in common with the latter only that we recognize matter as the presupposition or first ground of idea.

Matter for us is substance, while spirit is only accident; empirical phenomenon for us is the genus, while intellect is only a species or form of it...

Where there is intellect, knowledge, thinking, consciousness, there in turn must also be an object, material, which is known and which is indeed the most important thing. In this precisely does the old question lie, which divides idealists and materialists: what is "principal"—matter or intellect? But this question again is not a question, but merely a phrase, mere words. The real disagreement between the parties consists in that one wants to transform the world into some kind of sorcery, while the other wants to know nothing of it...

Since all phenomena of nature can be perceived by us only by means of intellect, all our perceptions are intellectual phenomena. Quite correct. But among these perceptions there is one special perception or phenomenon, considered "intellectual" par excellence—this latter is ordinary sound human Understanding, Reason, intellect, or cognitive faculty, while everything else, that is, the whole mass, is called matter. Consequently, all reduces to this: that matter, force, and intellect, separately and taken together, are of one and the same origin.

To call the phenomena of the world material or intellectual means to engage in miserable verbal disputation. The question consists in whether all things are of one and the same kind, or whether the world must be divided into the supernatural, the mysterious

See p. 142*
?))
Parties
in philosophy
NB
NB
?
NB
* See present volume, p. 409. Ed.

sorcery, on the one hand, and natural, fetid clay, on the other.

To clarify this, it is insufficient to derive everything from ponderable atoms, as the old materialists did. Matter is not only ponderable; it is also fragrant, bright, resonant—why then not rational?..

The prejudice that objects of touch are more comprehensible than phenomena of hearing or sensation generally drove the old materialists toward their atomistic speculations, led them to regard the tangible as the primary cause of all things. The concept of matter must be expanded. This includes all phenomena of reality, consequently, and our capacity to know, to explain.

When idealists call all phenomena of nature "representations" or "intellectual," we willingly acknowledge that these are not things "in themselves," but only objects of our sensation. In turn, the idealist will agree that among sensations, termed the objective world, [142] there is a particular thing, a particular phenomenon, called subjective sensation, soul, or consciousness. Accordingly, it is perfectly clear that the objective and subjective belong to one genus, that soul and body are made of one and the same empirical material.

For an unprejudiced person, there can be no doubt that spiritual material, or more precisely, the phenomenon of our cognitive faculty, is part of the world, not the reverse. The whole governs the part, matter governs spirit, at least in the main, although again the world is sometimes governed by the human spirit. It is precisely in this sense that we must love and honor the material world as the highest good, as the primary cause, as the creator of heaven and earth...

If social-democrats call themselves materialists, by this name they wish to say only that they recognize nothing that lies beyond the limits of the scientifically-functioning human Understanding, that all sorcery must cease...

NB
? ?

NB

NB


It is innate in us. It is given together with consciousness. Man's consciousness is knowledge of his personality as a part of the human race, of humanity and the universe. To know means to draw images for oneself and at the same time to be conscious that both the images and the things from which they have been taken have a common mother, from which they all proceed and into whose bosom they return. This maternal bosom is absolute truth itself; it is entirely true and yet mystical, i.e., it is an inexhaustible source of knowledge, and consequently unknowable to the end.

What we cognize in the world and about the world, notwithstanding all its truth and correctness, is nonetheless only cognized truth, i.e., a modification, a form or a part of truth. If I say that knowledge of infinite, absolute truth is innate in us, that it is the sole and only knowledge *a priori*, then experience nonetheless confirms this innate knowledge. We learn that every beginning and every end is merely a relative beginning and relative end, at the foundation of which lies an absolute that is inexhaustible by any experience. We learn from experience that every experience is part of what, speaking together with Kant, lies beyond the bounds of all experience.

The mystic will perhaps say: then there exists something that leads us beyond the limits of physical experience. We answer to this—yes and no simultaneously. For the old metaphysics that recognizes no boundaries, nothing of the sort exists. For consciousness that has become conscious of its essence, every particle, whether it be a particle of dust or stone or wood, is something unknowable to the end, i.e., each particle is inexhaustible material for human cognitive faculty, and consequently something lying beyond the limits of experience.

When I say that consciousness of the boundlessness and infinity of the physical world is innate, not acquired through experience, that it is consciousness existing *a priori* and preceding experience,* I must nonetheless add that it exists initially only as a germ and that with the aid of experience, in the struggle for existence, and with the aid of sexual selection, it has developed into what it is at the present time...

*— On experience. Ed.

Unhealthy mysticism unscientifically separates absolute truth from relative truth. It makes of the apparent thing and the "thing-in-itself," i.e., of appearance and truth, two categories different from each other *toto caelo** and not "contained in sublated form" in any common category. This murky mysticism transforms our knowledge and our cognitive faculty into "surrogates" that give us the possibility of sensing in the transcendent heaven embodied truth, a superhuman, supernatural spirit.

Humility always befits man. However, the assertion of man's incapacity to cognize truth has a twofold, worthy and unworthy sense for man. All that we cognize, all scientific conclusions, all phenomena—are parts of actual, real and absolute truth. Although the latter is inexhaustible and cannot be precisely reproduced in cognition or representation, nonetheless the pictures given by science of it are excellent pictures in the human, relative sense of the word, just as the propositions that I write here have a definite, precise meaning and at the same time do not have it if someone takes it into his head to distort them or interpret them falsely...

Spinoza says: there exists only one substance; it is universal, infinite, or absolute. All other, so-called finite substances flow from it, emerge in it, or sink in it; their being is merely relative, transitory, contingent. All finite things Spinoza with full justification considered merely modes of infinite substance, just as our newest natural science stands on the point of view of the eternity of matter and the inexhaustibility of force, i.e., fully confirms the proposition that all finite things are modes of infinite substance. Only in certain respects, although very essential ones, did later philosophy have to correct Spinoza.

**— wholly, along the whole line, in principle. Ed.

...spite of its materialist designation, frequently gives rise to misunderstandings.

First of all, the question: why does Engels call the materialism of the eighteenth century "metaphysical"? Metaphysicians were those people who were not content with the physical, or natural, world, but constantly had in mind a supernatural, metaphysical world; in the preface to his *Critique of Pure Reason*, Kant reduces the problem of metaphysics to three words: God, freedom, immortality. For it is well known that the all-benevolent God was a spirit, a supernatural spirit, who created the natural, physical, material world. The famous materialists of the eighteenth century were not friends or admirers of this biblical story. The problem of God, freedom and immortality, insofar as this concerns the supernatural world, did not interest these atheists at all; they adhered to the physical world and were therefore not metaphysicians.

Engels, consequently, calls them metaphysicians in another sense.

With the primary, cloud-dwelling great spirit, the French and English materialists of the past century coped somehow or other, but nevertheless they too continued to occupy themselves with the derivative, human spirit. Two opposing understandings of this spirit, its nature, origin and essence separate materialists from idealists. The latter regard the human spirit and its ideas as a product of the supernatural, metaphysical world. However, they were not content with mere faith in this distant origin, but have treated it, since the time of Socrates and Plato, far more seriously, endeavoring to provide a scientific foundation for their faith, to prove and explain it,—exactly as one proves and explains physical things of the concrete world. By this path, the idealists transferred the science of the properties of the human spirit from the realm of the supernatural and metaphysical into the real, physical, material world, which manifests itself as a world with dialectical properties, where spirit and matter, despite their duality, are united, that is, appear as it were as brother and sister, of one blood, from a common mother.

Initially, idealists were firm adherents of that religious premise that spirit created the world, but they were wrong in this, for as the final result their own inquiries turned out that, on the contrary, the natural material world is something primary, not created by any spirit, that it is itself rather the creator, having created from itself and developed man with his intellect.

And thus it turned out that the uncreated higher spirit is only a fantastic image of the natural spirit, which grew together with the human head and in it.

Idealism, which received its name from the fact that it considered the general idea and the ideas arising in the human head as standing both in time and in significance above the material world and preceding it,—this idealism undertook its task in the most dreamlike and metaphysical manner; but in further development the dreamlike quality diminished, and it became ever more sober, so that the philosopher Kant, in answer to the question he posed to himself: "How is metaphysics possible as a science?" answered: metaphysics as a science is impossible; another world, that is, the supernatural, can only be imagined and grasped by faith. Thus, the unsoundness of idealism was gradually overcome, and contemporary materialism appeared as a product of philosophical as well as general scientific development.

Since the unsoundness of idealism in the persons of its last famous representatives—Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel—was purely German, the result of this last—dialectical materialism—is predominantly a product of German origin.

Idealism derives the bodily world from spirit, following in the footsteps of religion, where the great spirit, hovering over the waters, has only to say: "Let there be," and all comes into being.

Such idealist derivation is metaphysical. But, as already said, the last famous representatives of German idealism were no longer such ardent metaphysicians. From the extra-worldly, supernatural, celestial spirit they freed themselves to a considerable extent; but they did not free themselves from dreams of the natural, on-this-side spirit. Christians, as is well known, deified the spirit, and by this deification...

NB
NB

dialectical materialism

NB

philosophers are so pervaded by it that they could not refrain from making our intellect the creator or producer of the material world even when the sober object of their investigation became the physical, human spirit. They do not cease laboring to clearly understand the relationship between our mental representations and the material things that we represent to ourselves, think about, and understand.

For us, dialectical or social-democratic materialists, the spiritual capacity of thought is a developed product of material nature, whereas according to German idealism the matter stands precisely the opposite. That is why Engels speaks of the "perversity" of this mode of thinking. Infatuation with spirit was a relic of old metaphysics.

The English and French materialists were, so to speak, premature opponents of dreaminess. This prematurity prevented them from completely freeing themselves from it. They were excessively radical and fell into the opposite error. Just as philosophical idealists raved about spirit and the spiritual, so they were carried away only with body and the corporeal. The idealists raved about the idea, the old materialists — about matter; both were dreamers and, consequently, metaphysicians; both excessively separated spirit and matter. Neither of these two parties rose to consciousness of the unity and uniqueness, commonality and universality of nature, which is not at all either material or spiritual, but both at once.

The metaphysical materialists of the past century and their contemporary, not yet extinct continuators underestimate the human spirit far too much and the investigation of its essence and its actual application, just as the idealists evaluate it excessively high... For the old materialists

NB !!
NB

matter alone is the supreme subject, and everything else — a predicate subordinate to it. This mode of thinking contains an overestimation of the subject and an underestimation of the predicate. They lose sight of the fact that the relationship between subject and predicate is absolutely changeable. The human spirit can perfectly freely make any predicate a subject and, conversely, any subject a predicate. Snow-white color, although it is intangible, is nonetheless just as substantial as the snow of white color. To posit that matter is substance, or the main cause, and its predicates, or properties, are only secondary appendages — this is an old, limited mode of thinking that takes no account whatsoever of the achievements of German dialecticians. One must finally understand that subjects are formed exclusively from predicates.

The assertion that thought is a secretion, product, or excretion of the brain, just as bile is an excretion of the liver, occasions no dispute, but at the same time one must not forget that we have here a very poor and insufficient comparison. The liver, the subject of this perception, is something tangible and weighty; just so, bile is what is created by the liver, it is its product and consequence. In this example both the subject and the predicate, i.e., both the liver and bile, are weighty and tangible, but by this very fact that is obscured which the materialists actually wanted to say, representing bile as a consequence and the liver as the acting cause. We must therefore particularly emphasize that which is entirely uncontroversial in this example, but in the comparison of the brain and mental activity is completely lost sight of. Namely: bile is not so much the result of the activity of the liver as the result of the entire vital process...

In asserting that bile is a product of the liver, materialists in no way deny and must not deny that both objects are equivalent objects of scientific investigation. But when one says that consciousness, the capacity of thought, is a property of the brain, then only the tangible subject must be

NB
NB

Before us stand two great men and one great cause. We strive to prove that both of them worked not in directions opposed to one another, but accomplished one common task. They elevated monistic world-outlook to such a height and supported it with such positive discoveries as had not been known before...

To our Hegel belongs the merit of establishing the self-development of nature on the broadest foundation and of liberating science in the most general form from the classifying point of view. Darwin criticizes the traditional classifying approach from the standpoint of zoology, while Hegel does so universally. Science moves from darkness to light. And philosophy, at the center of whose attention stands the elucidation of the process of human thought, moved forward; that it stopped at its special object rather instinctively is to a certain degree something that was already clear to it even before Hegel...

Hegel gives us a theory of development; he teaches that the world was not made, was not created, that it is not unchanging [233] Being, but becoming, producing itself. Just as in Darwin all classes of animals transition into one another, so too in Hegel all categories of the world—nothingness and something, Being and becoming, quantity and quality, time and eternity, the conscious and the unconscious, progress and stagnation—necessarily transition into one another...

No one will claim that Hegel brilliantly brought his undertaking to completion. His teaching, just as little as Darwin's teaching, rendered further development superfluous, but it gave an impetus to all science and to all human life—an impetus of tremendous importance. Hegel anticipated Darwin, but Darwin, unfortunately, did not know so kindred a Hegel.

With this "unfortunately" we do not wish to reproach the great naturalist; we merely wish to remind that the specialist work of Darwin must be complemented by the work of the great synthesizer Hegel, so that in this way we might advance beyond them and achieve greater clarity.

We have seen that Hegel's philosophy was so obscure that the teacher had to say of his best student that he had misunderstood him. The clarification of this obscurity was promoted not only by his successor Feuerbach and other Hegelians, but by all the scientific, political, and economic development of the world...

NB
NB
(.
NB NB
(.


[235-243] In the fact that in our greatest poets and thinkers is expressed the tendency toward "monistic, purest form of faith" and the striving toward a physical view of nature, which makes impossible all metaphysics and eliminates the supernatural God along with all the rubbish of miracles from the domain of science—in this Haeckel is entirely correct. But when he becomes so carried away and says that this tendency "long ago found its most perfect expression," then he is very greatly mistaken, mistaken even concerning himself and his own confession of faith. Even Haeckel does not yet know how to think monoistically.

We shall now give a more detailed substantiation of this reproach, but previously we wish to establish the fact that this reproach is deserved not only by Haeckel, but by the entire school of our contemporary natural science, inasmuch as it neglects the results of almost three thousand years of development of philosophy, which has behind it a long and rich history of experience, as substantial as experimental natural science itself...

In these words of Haeckel's there are contained three points which we wish to single out and which will prove to us that "monistic world-outlook" has not yet found perfect expression in its most radical, natural-scientific representative.

The ancient faith perceives the general first principle of all Being in its personal God, who is supernatural, indescribable, incomprehensible in our concepts, who is spirit, something mysterious. The new religion à la Haeckel maintains that nature, to which it gives the old name of God, is precisely the first principle of all things...

The difference between the commonplace, the natural and the unnatural, between the physical and the metaphysical revelation, between religion and divinity is so enormous that a view of nature, cleansed of all extraneous elements, as it presents itself to the Darwinist Haeckel, would have every right to renounce the old names and the divine religion resting on revelation and to come forward "destructively" against the latter in full array of monistic world-outlook. By refusing to do this, Darwinism manifests only the limitedness of its doctrine of development...

That Haeckel, the most prominent representative of natural-scientific monism, nonetheless still sits astride this dualistic hobbyhorse is strikingly demonstrated by his third point, which asserts that "given the present organization of our brain," the final first cause of all phenomena is unknowable.

What does unknowable mean?

NB
NB
NB


Not that which an individual person cognizes in one way or another thanks to accidental disposition or imperfect organization, but that which humanity as a whole must cognize thanks to its sensibility and Understanding—Kant called this, in a certain sense, objective. He called such knowledge objective inasmuch as we speak only of our experience; on the contrary, he called it transcendental or, in other words, false, if we extend such knowledge to things-in-themselves, that is, to absolute things existing independently of our cognition"...

Yes, materialists have hitherto not troubled themselves to account for the subjective element of our cognition and uncritically accepted sensible objects at face value. This error must be corrected.

Let us accept the world for what it is according to Kant: for a mixture of subject and object, but let us maintain that the entire world is one mixture, one unity; let us also acknowledge that this unity is dialectical, that is, composed of its own opposite, of a mixing or multiplicity. And thus in the multiplicity of the world there are things, such as boards, stones, trees, and heaps of clay, which are unconditionally called objects. I say: "they are called" so, but I do not yet say that they are objects. There are also things, such as colors, smells, warmth, light, and so forth, the objectivity of which is already more doubtful; then come things which are pushed back even further, such as physical pain, thirst, love, and spring feelings, which are unconditionally subjective. Finally, there are still objects which appear more subjective and most subjective, in the comparative and superlative degree, such as accidental dispositions, dreams, hallucinations, and so on.

Here we approach the very essence of the question. Materialism has won a victory, once it must be acknowledged that a dream is a real, indubitable, although considered subjective, process. We are ready in such a case to join with the "critical" philosophers who assert that boards and stones, all those things which are called indubitable objects, are also perceived by our organs of sight and touch, consequently they are not pure objects, but subjective phenomena. We willingly acknowledge that already the thought of a pure object, or a "thing-in-itself," is an absurd thought, which, so to speak, crossed the eyes into another world.

Objective*
according to Kant
NB
NB
NB
* — objective. Ed.

The distinction between subject and object is relative. Both are of one kind. That which we perceive through the faculty of Understanding, we perceive as part of a whole and as a whole part...

[268-272] The awareness of this dialectic illuminates and fully clarifies the mystical striving to seek truth behind appearance, that is, to seek the subject behind each predicate. Only through inability to operate with concepts dialectically can this striving take such a false direction as to seek the subject outside the predicate, truth outside phenomena. Critical theory of cognition must cognize the very instrument of experience as something experiential, and therefore talk of going beyond all experience becomes meaningless.

If contemporary philosophers, headed by the historian of materialism, having approached the very essence of the question, declare that the world is phenomena, that is, objects of cognition of nature, that this cognition has to do with changes, but that we still seek some higher cognition or eternal, essential objects, then it becomes clear that these are either swindlers or fools, who are not content with studying all the grains of sand in a heap of sand, but behind all the grains seek still some kind of heap of sand that has no grains of sand in it.

Whoever has completely broken with our vale of tears—the world of phenomena—let him sit himself down together with his immortal soul in a fiery chariot and depart to heaven. But whoever wishes to remain here and believe in the saving power of scientific cognition of nature must trust in materialist logic. And its § 1 reads: the intellectual kingdom is only of this world, and § 2: the activity which we call cognition, Understanding, explanation, can consist in the classification by genera and species of this sensible world, permeated with the unity of being; it cannot occupy itself with anything else besides formal cognition of nature. No other cognition exists.

But now appears a metaphysical striving, which is not content with "formal cognition" and wishes—itself not knowing how—to cognize. It seems to it insufficient to precisely classify with the aid of Understanding the data of experience. What natural science calls science is for it only a surrogate, a pitiful, limited knowledge; it demands unlimited spiritualization, such that things would completely dissolve in the concept. But why does this dear striving not wish to understand that it only sets excessive demands? The world does not originate from spirit, but the opposite. Being is not a species of intellect, but the opposite—intellect is a species of empirical existence. Being is that which is absolute, which is ubiquitous and eternal; thinking is only a special, limited form of it...

NB
NB

Science or cognition should not replace life; life cannot be exhausted by science, because it is something greater. Therefore, through cognition or explanation, one cannot overcome any thing. No thing can be fully cognized: this cherry no more than this sensation. If I have studied and understood the cherry in accordance with all the requirements of science—botanically, chemically, physiologically, etc.—then still I have truly come to know it only after I have simultaneously perceived it: seen it, touched it, and swallowed it...

By the meager philosophical criticism raging at the present time, human Understanding is depicted as a wretched pauper, capable of explaining only the superficial phenomena of things, while the true explanation is supposedly closed to it, and the essence of things is incomprehensible to it. And the question arises: does each thing have its own particular essence, does the infinite multitude of these essences exist, or does the entire world have only one whole? Here it is easy to see that our head possesses the faculty of bringing everything into connection, of summing all parts and dividing all sums. The intellect makes all phenomena into essences, and cognizes essences as phenomena of one great essence—nature. The contradiction between phenomenon and essence is not a contradiction at all, but a logical operation, a dialectical formality. The essence of the Universe is phenomenon, and its phenomena express the essence.

Therefore, long live this striving, this metaphysical need to seek essence behind every appearance—but on the condition that it recognizes "formal cognition of nature" as the sole rational practice of science. The striving to go beyond phenomena toward truth and essence is a divine, heavenly—that is, a scientific—striving. But it must not overstep the mark; it must know its limits. It must seek the divine and heavenly in the earthly and transient and not separate its truths and essences from phenomena; it must only seek subjective objects and relative truth.

The old and new Kantians will perhaps agree with the latter, but we cannot agree with their gloomy resignation, with that glance which they stealthily
*Phenomena and Essence
[marginal note: NB]
[marginal note: NB]
[marginal note: NB]
[marginal note: NB]
* - Phenomena and Essence. Ed.
cast toward a higher world and with which they accompany their teaching. We do not agree that "the limits of cognition" will cease to be limits, while faith constantly accompanies unlimited Understanding. Their Reason says: "Where there are phenomena, there must also be something transcendent that appears." But our critique says: "That which appears is itself phenomenon; subject and predicate are homogeneous"...

The monistic worldview of natural scientists—natural scientists in the narrower sense of the word—is insufficient... Our worldview can become monistic only through the materialist theory of cognition. As soon as we understand in general the relation between subject and predicate, one cannot deny that our intellect is a kind or form of empirical reality. Materialism, it is true, established this cardinal proposition long ago, but it remained a bare assertion, rather an anticipation. For proof, a general view is necessary—that science in general neither wants nor can want anything other than the classification of sensory observations by genera and by species.

Segmentation or segmented unity—this is all that it can do and all that it desires.

Savages deify the sun, the moon, and other things. Civilized people have made spirit into a god and the faculty of thought into their fetish. In the new society this must not be.

There people will live in dialectical communion, as multitude in unity; and the light of cognition is also destined to become a tool among other tools.

101: Marx on Dialectics.* [101: Marx on Dialectics.]
256: Lange—most wretched thrashing about in metaphysical snares.
[256: Lange—most wretched floundering in metaphysical snares.]
233: Hegel stands above Darwin in the doctrine of development.
[233: Hegel stands above Darwin in the doctrine of development.]

These remarks were written no earlier
than February and no later than October
1908.

Published for the first time,
from the original manuscript

[marginal note: NB]
[marginal note: NB]
[marginal note: NB]
* The text on the left side of the page was written by V. I. Lenin on the cover of I. Dietzgen's book; the numbers indicate the pages of Dietzgen's book (see the present volume, pp. 390, 448, 443). Ed.
